By the time you read this we’ll have become grandparents for the fourth time. Actually, I have three more grandchildren from what a friend calls “the old movie,” so you’d think I’d be an experienced hand by now, but I don’t seem to fit into the Norman Rockwell (ask your mom) image of the kindly senior citizen handing down the wisdom of the ages to eager youngsters. I lose them pretty quickly to an X-Box or to Wii, and yield to my wife’s capacities as a model grandmother.
The Bible isn’t much on grandfathers, although David seems preoccupied with them. Grandchildren populate the Torah’s genealogies, but the New Testament writers can’t quite figure them out either. Actually, I can’t find a New Testament figure, or at least one of the good guys, who actually had a grandchild. Where’s a theologian when you need one?
The Bible is more focused on first-generation children and, especially in the New Testament, on the Child and the youngsters gathered about him whose innocence would open the gates to the kingdom of Heaven. There’s not much, though, in the way of parenting advice that wouldn’t get you a visit from the politically-correct police.
“Do not withhold discipline from a child,” Proverbs counsels. “If you beat him with a rod, he will not die.” Sounds like my dad and I’d be willing to bet there haven’t been many other sermons delivered on that reading recently.
The Bible writers get hung up on the same thing most of us get hung up on: conception. I’ve often thought that, except for the tragic cases of which there are far too many, it is a reflection of God’s grace that conception is a pleasant experience. If it was work, there likely wouldn’t be so many of us. It is tempting to muse about what that implies about the nature of sin, but as Record editors’ nerves are probably already a-twitch, I’ll go no further down that path.
They say that more than two hundred thousand miracles are born every day. The arrival of a child in this world is, from all accounts, not a pleasant experience.
“When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come;” writes John, “but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.” There is no recorded comment from Mary or Elizabeth.
I’ll let mothers testify for mothers and kids don’t have much to say about the process, but as a dad I’ve had it both ways—smoking and pacing in the waiting room, and coaching my labouring wife in the breathing exercises we had learned at the pre-natal classes. I probably don’t have to tell you what she had to say.
Suddenly a child is born and we hold a miracle in our hands. He or she is a little messy and noisy but so is the miracle of the world around us. This child surely wasn’t the result of an immaculate conception. but was most certainly conceived in love, and will probably never be called a saviour unless he or she goes on to play goal for the Canadiens, but for a moment we are transported to the hush and hope of a stable in Bethlehem and learn in an instant of savouring newborn innocence and possibility what our parents tried to tell us, tried to show us and never quite got through our rebellious little heads. Love has broken out and it will survive the two-in-the-morning feedings and temper tantrums – theirs and ours – and adolescent angst and even the grandchildren, and forty years later we’ll still love them and worry about them and forgive them if they trip up. It’s no wonder we call God the Father.
